Made in USA

Deceptive to use average pay. Median is 46K.

It’s not at all deceptive to use average as a result. It’s just another way of looking at it depending on point of view. Median only gives the middle point of the range which can be horribly skewed due to outliers.

Let’s say there are 10 guys in a bar and the "average" income of them is $40K/yr. Then someone like Bill Gates walks into the bar and has a drink with them. The average pay of those guys would be in the multiples of millions no matter if you use mean, median or mode.

And when they say household income, don’t forget that in most cases in America, both spouses are working, which would halve the value.

All the best,
Nonoise

@nonoise

Let’s say there are 10 guys in a bar and the "average" income of them is $40K/yr. Then someone like Bill Gates walks into the bar and has a drink with them. The average pay of those guys would be in the multiples of millions no matter if you use mean, median or mode.

No offense intended but in your example, you are only correct that the mean(average) would skew radically higher because of the presence of Bill Gates in the sample data set. The median, however, is the middlemost number so for the pre-Gates data set that that would have been the #5 placeholder. The mode(the most frequently occurring number in the data set) would remain unchanged.